


Business on the Wayne

by adiva_calandia



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman Begins (2005), Dark Knight (2008)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Female Bruce Wayne, Gen, Media Parody, News Media, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 15:11:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adiva_calandia/pseuds/adiva_calandia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanity Fair's December 2009 profile on Roberta Wayne, heiress to the Wayne Enterprises fortune: Gotham’s princess opens up about fame, family, and the future.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Ten years ago, if you saw the name “Roberta Wayne” in print, it was almost certainly emblazoned across the cover a gossip magazine and paired with speculation about what -- or who -- Gotham’s most famous wild child was doing after sunset. Theoretically in her junior year of college, Wayne was a paparazzo's dream and a parent’s nightmare, spotted night after night at parties and clubs, trying on Ivy League schools like a fashionista at a boutique, rumored to be dating everyone from B-list celebrities to her professors.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Business on the Wayne

  
**Business on the Wayne  
** **Gotham’s princess opens up about fame, family, and the future**  


By Victoria Vale  
December 2009

**Ten years ago,** if you saw the name “Roberta Wayne” in print, it was almost certainly emblazoned across the cover a gossip magazine and paired with speculation about what -- or who -- Gotham’s most famous wild child was doing after sunset. Theoretically in her junior year of college, Wayne was a paparazzo's dream and a parent’s nightmare, spotted night after night at parties and clubs, trying on Ivy League schools like a fashionista at a boutique, rumored to be dating everyone from B-list celebrities to her professors.

One year later, Wayne returned to Gotham to attend the high-profile appeal of the man who murdered her parents -- and then disappeared so thoroughly for nearly a decade that she was presumed dead. Her reappearance two years ago after her seven-year absence was hailed as a much-needed miracle for Wayne Enterprises. Her prompt return to her playgirl ways, though, was a godsend only for the tabloids.

Wayne laughs off questions about her college years these days, although her laughter isn’t without a bitter edge. “It was impossible _not_ to get caught in a compromising position those days. A photographer signed up for one of my classes once to try and get pictures of me. Joke’s on him, I never went.”

And the more recent kerfuffles? Wayne grows serious. “I’ll be honest. I wasn’t smart. I don’t know what I was thinking when I came back, but I wasn’t . . .” She trails off into a wry smile. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m trying to make up for lost time now.”

* * *

 

 **Tragedy has dogged Wayne’s heels since her early years.** In 1985, when Wayne was only eight years old, she witnessed the mugging and murder of her parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, Gotham’s most celebrated philanthropists. The Waynes were gunned down as the family left the Gotham Opera House. Their deaths rocked the city. “I think in Gotham, for some of us in Gotham,” says current district attorney Marion Grange, “the Park Row tragedy was a defining moment. You ask people of a certain age and they can all tell you exactly where they were when they heard about it. It changed the face of the city.”

With the death of the Waynes, Gotham lost two of its staunchest advocates -- and biggest financial backers -- for social change and economic justice. The corruption and financial depression that swallowed Gotham for a decade after that was inevitable, most economists agree, but Grange points to that night as a symbolic turning point. “Suddenly there was this sense that, if even these supposed untouchables could be killed, was anyone safe? It emboldened the organized crime families. You saw this spike in protection rackets, then extortion.”

For Roberta Wayne, though, the rising tide of crime mattered little. When I ask her about that night on Park Row, she’s quiet for so long that I start to wonder if she’s going to call the interview off.

“Obviously it changed me. It would change anyone, but I was so young. I was angry about it for such a long time. When Joe Chill was paroled, I couldn’t believe it, I thought, ‘This is what we’ve come to? This is what Gotham does? Puts murderers back on the streets?’ But I think -- I don’t think my parents would have wanted me to be angry at him, not the way I was. He was desperate. He was exactly the kind of person they wanted so badly to help. I remember my father trying to talk him down, even then.”

What would she say to him, if she had the chance?

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I had the chance, at his hearing. And I couldn’t say anything then. I don’t think I could say anything now.”

After Chill’s assassination at his hearing, Wayne dropped off the map for seven years, a disappearing act worthy of Amelia Earhart or D. B. Cooper. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a constant stream of speculation about what she did and why, with rumors putting her everywhere from meditating in an ashram in India to becoming a Patty Hearst-like criminal in China to living as the kept mistress of an oil sheik. But no matter how many times I ask her about how she spent those years, offering to let her set the record straight, Wayne refuses to talk about them in anything but the vaguest terms. “I traveled,” she says. “I went looking for myself. I wanted the anonymity.”

And she got it: after five years of fruitless searching, William Earle, then CEO of Wayne Enterprises, called off the hunt and had her declared dead. Her resurrection and return just as the company prepared to go public was a nine days’ wonder, boosting public interest in what might otherwise have been a fairly standard corporate IPO but causing barely-concealed friction within the company.

That friction, some commentators argue, may have contributed to the debacle of Wayne’s 30th birthday party. Tabloids reported that Wayne behaved erratically at the party, arriving late, acting withdrawn with guests, and ultimately kicking her guests out after delivering a drunken rant about sycophants and suck-ups sponging off the Wayne family. Not long after the guests left, Wayne apparently accidentally set fire to the house, burning Wayne Manor to the ground.

I reached out to Dr. Chase Meridian of Gotham General Hospital, who enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame after penning a sympathetic analysis of Wayne for the Gotham Globe in 2007 following the incident. “I stand by my initial analysis of Ms. Wayne,” Dr. Meridian said in an email. “Returning to Gotham ‘from the dead,’ while a positive life change, was without question stressful and possibly even traumatic. The SRRS [Social Readjustment Rating Scale, also known as the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale] doesn’t even have an entry for a life event of that magnitude."

Additionally, she said, "In times of stress and trauma, it’s not unusual for a person to relive past traumas. To me, the fire at Wayne Manor was clearly an abreactive attempt at catharsis by Ms. Wayne: symbolically, she was losing her parents again, but this time on something resembling her own terms. Clearly it isn’t a healthy coping mechanism, but one catastrophic event might be preferable to a lifetime of obsession and pain.” Dr. Meridian was quick to emphasize that she has not met Wayne and is not now, nor ever has been, her doctor, and that her analysis was done on her own time rather than at the behest of Gotham General.

Wayne’s coping mechanisms over the next year were no less scandalous. While reconstruction began on Wayne Manor, she moved into a downtown penthouse and continued to make headlines: firing her CEO with no notice, wrecking several luxury cars in a matter of months, and at one point absconding with the principal dancers of the visiting Russian ballet for a weekend on her yacht. And yet now, sitting with me in her surprisingly small office at Wayne Enterprises, she seems like a consummate businesswoman, ready to set aside childish things and redefine herself as an adult. So what changed?

* * *

 

 **The answer: Gotham itself changed -- and for Wayne, there’s no going back.** Wayne’s return to Gotham coincided with the arrival of the vigilante known as the Bat, who quickly and seemingly singlehandedly began to turn the tide against the organized crime families that had been running Gotham. With that turn came a crop of high-profile city officials dedicated to ridding Gotham of corruption, including current mayor Anthony Garcia and much-beloved district attorney Harvey Dent.

Wayne pinpoints meeting Dent as the moment she started to consider what she could do to give back to Gotham. “Philanthropy and advocacy were always so central to my parents, the idea that because we’re in a position to help, we have a duty to do so. I mean, I’ve got all this money” -- last year Forbes listed her personal net worth at $5.8 billion -- “but what good is it if I don’t do something with it? And I thought, well, nobody’s going to take _me_ seriously in politics.” She laughs. “But Harvey Dent -- he was a man I thought could do for this city what I couldn’t. You have no idea how badly I wanted him to succeed.”

But it wasn’t to be. In 2008, Gotham found itself under attack by a terrorist known only as the Joker -- a terrorist Wayne herself only barely missed meeting.

During a fundraising party Wayne threw for a number of high-profile guests, including Dent and his partner, Wayne’s childhood friend Rachel Dawes, the Joker broke into her penthouse in search of Dent. “I was out on the balcony and all of a sudden everyone inside is screaming,” Wayne recalls. “I have to be honest: I grabbed Rachel and just went straight for the panic room. I didn’t know what else to do. I mean, especially when I was little I had these bodyguards who taught me that if someone came after me, the thing to do was get to somewhere safe. I didn’t even know they were after Dent at the time, I just -- panicked.”

Several guests sustained injuries, and the penthouse itself was damaged, but nobody was killed. A few days later, though, the Joker managed to kidnap both Dent and Dawes. Dawes was killed in the ensuing hostage situation; Dent survived, only to be killed by the Bat shortly afterwards for unknown reasons.

There’s probably not a soul in Gotham who didn’t feel the impact of the Joker’s actions. The recorded death toll was in the high dozens, with many experts speculating that unreported deaths in the criminal underworld could push that number even higher. The murder of Harvey Dent, like the Park Row Tragedy, is a defining moment for this generation of Gothamites. And for Wayne, losing her always-tenuous sense of security, a colleague, and her best friend all in one fell swoop was shattering.

The wound is obviously still fresh; when we reached this point in the interview, Wayne had to excuse herself for several minutes. I left her alone in her office to compose herself, and sitting out in reception I found a snippet of an old song stuck in my head: _money can’t buy you love -- everybody tells me so._ Perhaps Roberta Wayne understands that better than I can.

* * *

 

 **If tragedy shaped her childhood, she isn’t going to let it define her adulthood.** “Gotham still needs help, and I want to be that help, however I can. Whatever it takes. I can’t just sit around and be sad and look pretty anymore.” So no more disappearing acts? “No,” she laughs, “no, I’m pretty sure I’ve got that out of my system now.”

What _is_ next, then?

“A few things.” Though Wayne Enterprises has lost a number of defense contracts since Wayne’s return and their IPO, she’s not concerned. “Call me old-fashioned, but I want to honor my parents’ legacy. My father was a doctor and my mother was an activist, and they were shot to death. I don’t particularly want people to be buying Wayne brand guns.” She hints at branching out into alternative energy, networking technology, medicine. Of course, there’s a limit to how much she’ll say about the company’s plans on record, due to confidentiality concerns.

“But I can tell you we’re working through the paperwork for a number of charitable efforts. You know, scholarships, expanding our Phones for Free program, investing in various non-profits. Especially children’s homes, youth centers. I want to help kids who don’t have the resources I did.”

And what about the personal life of the tabloid’s favorite headliner? Wayne smirks when I ask the question.

“I’ll probably hear about it from the tabloids the same as everyone else.” She shakes her head. “No, I don’t know. I’m not very good at planning. I pay people to make plans for the company, but I can’t exactly do that for my personal life, can I?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her, “you could always hire a life coach.”

She bursts out laughing.

It doesn’t occur to me until later, when I’m writing, how remarkable that laughter was, how genuine. Wayne has been packaged and pushed to the public in so many different ways: as tragic orphan, as frivolous eye-candy, as a boardroom playgirl. Under all those layers, though, she’s a young woman much like the company that bears her name -- a work in progress, but a force to be reckoned with.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously I have to hat-tip to MediAvengers (http://archiveofourown.org/series/45997), which is a completely inspiring body of work. nottonyharrison's MCU media parodies are incredible; I am a humble imitator.
> 
> And thanks to everyone who's helped me develop this AU (y'all know who you are ♥) and to the people on Tumblr who were all "Rule 63!Bruce Wayne? Tell me more!"


End file.
